Wednesday, March 26, 2008

NASA's science chief resigns

It's hard to know what to make of the news that Alan Stern, NASA's top-ranking science official, and John Mather, the agency's Nobel-prize-winning chief scientist, have decided to leavetheir posts, but the shake-up can't be good for the agency.

Stern took the helm in April 2007, moving to NASA headquarters in Washington, DC, from a top spot at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where he headed up NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto.

So far, the response to Stern's departure has been negative. Louis Friedman, executive director of the space advocacy group The Planetary Society said in a statement: "We are sorry to learn of Alan Stern's resignation . . . . During his tenure, Alan made significant changes that have helped restore the importance of science in NASA's mission. This was especially true in the 2009 budget proposal, which included two overdue Earth science missions and an outer planets flagship mission."

"[Stern] was working under extraordinarily difficult budget constraints, dealing with many issues beyond his control," the statement continues.

Keith Cowing, editor of the independent website NASA Watch, puts the blame for Stern's resignation squarely on Griffin: "Mike Griffin seems to have an uncanny ability to cause anyone with talent, energy, and dedication to walk away from NASA. This departure by Alan Stern is troubling - no, it is downright depressing. Indeed, I think it clearly signals the end of Mike Griffin's ability to credibly manage the agency."

But Cowing also posted part of an email attributed to Stern that reads: "I . . . want you to know that Mike and I remain on good terms. He remains in my eyes the best Administrator NASA has ever had."

Stern said he will leave in the next few weeks, and NASA says Edward Weiler, director of the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, will temporarily step in as associate administrator for science, a post he had held from 1998 to 2004.

What do you think these resignations mean for NASA? Does the loss of such well-respected scientists suggest that the agency can never be reformed?

Observatory building to be next Bond villain's lair

A futuristic domed residence for astronomers will be featured in the next James Bond film, serving as a hideout for a villain chased by Bond.

The building is called the Residencia, and is located in the mountains of Chile's Atacama Desert. It houses astronomers working at the nearby Paranal Observatory, which houses the world class Very Large Telescope (VLT) array of four 8.2-metre telescopes.

Much of the building is underground, but a 35-metre-wide glass dome lets in plenty of light. Beneath the dome, residents can relax in a swimming pool and stroll through a tropical garden. The building also contains 108 bedrooms, 22 offices, a restaurant with space for 200 people and a cinema.

A 2006 BBC story playfully described it as "a cross between a Bond villain's hideout and a university hall of residence".

The resemblance did not go unnoticed by the makers of the next Bond film.

"It is a true oasis and the perfect hideout for Dominic Greene, our villain, whom 007 is tracking in our new James Bond film," says the movie's producer Michael G Wilson.

The new Bond film, called Quantum of Solace, will debut on 31 October in the UK and on 7 November in the US and elsewhere.

In case you were wondering, the Residencia cost 12 million Euros to build, which is less than 2% of the overall cost of the VLT, according to the European Southern Observatory, which manages the facility.

This continues a long tradition of using observatories in movies. Probably the best known example is the movie Contact, which featured the Arecibo and Very Large Array radio telescopes, not just as backdrops but as integral parts of the story.

The Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, California, US, has been used in umpteen movies, as it is conveniently located next door to Hollywood. These have included the recent Transformers movie, the first Terminator movie, and a previous Bond film, Goldeneye.

What's your favourite movie scene featuring an observatory or other space-related location from real life? Mine would have to be the scene shot in the Hayden Planetarium in Woody Allen's Manhattan.

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Proposed space food suffers from 'smell problem'

If you'd like to travel to Mars someday, make sure you have a strong stomach. The latest diet proposed for Martian astronauts includes a plant called mosquito fern, which apparently has a pungent and not entirely pleasant odour.

The variety of foods available to humans trying to eke out an existence on Mars would naturally be limited. The plants and animals brought along for food would have to be carefully chosen in order to maximise nutrition while using the smallest amount of resources possible.

With that in mind, researchers have previously proposed that Martian diets include cookies made from silkworm pupae. I've never indulged in such fare myself, and find the idea less than appealing. But taste is a very subjective thing and plenty of people happily eat silkworm pupae on a regular basis here on Earth.

The same cannot be said of a malodorous plant called Azolla, also known as mosquito fern.

Azolla grows on the surfaces of lakes, ponds and streams and is rich in nutrients like potassium and phosphorous. As an added benefit, symbiotic bacteria that grow with Azolla take nitrogen from the air, making important nitrogen-containing nutrients needed by other food crops like rice.

While the taste of Azolla may be okay, its odoriferous properties leave something to be desired, according to the study. "Azolla roots taste similar to Alfalfa sprouts, and the leaves resemble moss," the study says. "However, the smell of Azolla might cause a problem of acceptance as food material."

This might be cause for concern, but the researchers are quick to add that "boiling Azolla reduces its smell to an acceptable level". That may be the case, but it doesn't exactly get my taste buds tingling. If people ever do travel to Mars, I guess they won't be going for the food.

Final odyssey: Arthur C Clarke dies at 90

With the death of Sir Arthur C. Clarke we have lost one of the last original visionaries of the Space Age, and one of its most eloquent dreamers. Many of us have also lost one of our favourite authors.

He was famed for his proposal for communications satellites, his writings on the future and championing of futuristic ideas, and his science fiction writings, and his co-authorship of the movie classic 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Clarke had a long-standing interest in both space and science fiction. He was an early member of the British Interplanetary Society, and at 20 had a letter explaining rocket science - complete with equations - published in the May 1938 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. That and his work as a radar specialist for the Royal Air Force during World War II led to his most famous proposal - satellite communications from geosynchronous orbit, published in Wireless World in 1945. Fascinated by technology, rocketry, and the future he also began writing science fiction.

Fourteen of his books sit on my desk as I write, only a small part of his output. One is a collection of his scientific and technical articles, Ascent to Orbit. Another is a wonderful book on the history of the global telecommunications network, How the World Was One: Beyond the Global Village, which begins with the transatlantic telegraph. Two others are paperback editions of his futuristic essays dating back nearly half a century - Profiles of the Future and The Challenge of the Spaceship. They're both well-written and full of ideas, no mean accomplishment.

The other ten are science fiction, a field where Sir Arthur became a giant ranked with Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein. Clarke didn't fiddle with ray guns and space pirates; he wowed readers with big concepts and vivid visions of the future. The movie 2001 was the ultimate idea-trip into the future, with Stanley Kubrick's cinematography complementing Sir Arthur's visions.

Childhood's End and A Fall of Moondust are classics of very different sorts. I particularly loved The Fountains of Paradise, set in a land similar to his adopted home of Sri Lanka, telling of the quest to build a space elevator reaching geosynchronous orbit.

Although confined to a wheelchair by post-polio syndrome in his last years, Sir Arthur remained optimistic about the space elevator, no matter how many people said it was daft. He was sure it would come to pass "50 years after everyone stops laughing".

His was a rich life that may not have finished leaving its mark on the world.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

NASA chief on his legacy - and grammatical pet peeves

What pushes NASA chief Mike Griffin's buttons? Poor grammar, he admitted on Monday at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas.

In a short speech to hundreds of scientists at the meeting, Griffin described his fondness for the mission statement of the starship Enterprise in Star Trek: "To explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilisations, to boldly go where no man has gone before."

He joked that it would be great to use as NASA's own mission statement, except that the split infinitive in the last phrase offends his inner pedant. "I will catch split infinitives almost as a reflex," he said, adding that he often berates others for grammatical errors.

An audience member later asked him to turn his critical eye on himself and comment on his own performance as NASA chief.

"I can't grade my own paper," he protested at first. "I have a deep ethical aversion to self-assessment."

But he gave it a go anyway, saying that his greatest achievement was putting space experts in top posts at NASA. He said that previously, those posts were often filled by people with no previous experience in space science or engineering.

"I would like people to say that I repopulated NASA headquarters with people who were at the top of the space business," he said. "You may agree or disagree with some of the decisions . . . but none of them took their job at headquarters as a nervous virgin."

As for his greatest disappointment, he said he regretted having failed to persuade US policy makers to give higher priority to ensuring a quick and smooth transition between the space shuttle's retirement and its replacement. He has previously said that at current funding levels, the new Orion spacecraft and Ares rocket will not be ready for service until 2015, five years after the shuttle's last flight.

But a few minutes later, responding to repeated questions about how supporters of space exploration could help win a bigger NASA budget, he argued that the agency's existing level of funding was something to be grateful for.

"There is not another advanced nation in the world where their space community wouldn't kill to have the budget that NASA has," he said, adding that the space agency is getting about the same amount of money today as it was during the Apollo era. (That's roughly true if you adjust for inflation and simply compare the number of dollars spent in the 15 years including Apollo with the most recent 15 years. But US budgets were much smaller back then, so Apollo was a much bigger fraction of overall government spending - peaking at more than 4% compared to 0.6% today.)

"We get as much money today," Griffin said. "If we have less to show for it than we remember from looking back, then to quote Shakespeare, the fault lies not in our stars but in ourselves."

David Shiga, online reporter (Image of Griffin on his first day as chief in 2005: NASA/Renee Bouchard)

Monday, March 10, 2008

Should NASA try to appeal to 'Generation Y'?

NASA isn't normally associated with being young and hip, but that could change if a group of trendy, "wired" employees at the agency have their way.

The group consists of NASA employees in their 20s and 30s - the so-called Generation Y, which includes everyone born after about 1977.

In a slideshow that has been making the rounds at NASA, the group argues that the agency is in danger of losing touch with and becoming irrelevant to this younger generation of independent, always wired and quickly bored individuals.

As they point out, the Apollo programme, highlighted by the first man to walk on the Moon, made for great historic stuff in the 1970s. But "humanity's giant leap" is ancient history for most young people today.

As a member of Generation Y myself, a lot of what they have to say resonates with me. NASA does some stellar science, and the things the agency aspires to are really mind-blowing if you pause to think about them (living on Mars anyone?), but a lot of my friends who are my age either don't know or don't care.

So how can NASA reach out and inspire a generation of people who grew up with the internet, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, reality TV, and an "anyone can be a star" mentality?

The group proposes that NASA use these very tools to connect with younger people. To reach a generation that thrives on social media and virtual interactions, provide ways for them to participate. In short, make NASA interactive.

"We wanted to get people talking about how to make NASA a better, more open, innovative, empowering agency that could appeal not only to our generation, but to all generations," the group writes in their blog.

Their passion comes through clearly in their posts, and if the comments are any indication, they're succeeding at sparking discussion about this topic.

Many of the comments are by people commending the group's mission to open NASA up, but some posts portray a few who seem to take umbrage at the idea that the agency should cater to the whims of what they see as a spoiled and self-important generation.

But the flaws of Generation Y are also its potential strengths, the group says: "Yes, we have been dubbed the 'me' generation. Is that a terrible thing? What if we could take our generation's 'self-importance' and use it to make a difference? Can it be that we are also an empowered generation who will not be afraid to challenge accepted norms when needed? Are we passionate? Yes. Anxious? Of course. Connected? Absolutely."

I for one wish them all the best, because, as they point out, the burden of bankrolling NASA's vision will increasingly fall upon our generation in the coming years, so the sooner we get on the same page the better.

UK's Jodrell Bank radio telescope on eBay

The UK's famed Jodrell Bank Observatory is up for sale on eBay. The offering is only a prank - although one clever enough to be well worth reading ("Rotates 360 degrees," the post enthuses. "Point it down to the ground and you can hear Australians talking to their kangaroos!"). But it's true that the British government has threatened to shut the place down, despite having poured millions of pounds into upgrades in recent years.

The story eerily parallels events in the US, where the National Science Foundation plans to reduce funding to the 305-metre Arecibo radio telescope, the world's largest. Funding agencies want to build shiny new telescopes, and with budgets tight, they decide to chop older facilities, no matter how much science they produce or how singular their instruments. Didn't somebody outlaw age discrimination?

Sir Bernard Lovell began radio-astronomy research at Jodrell Bank in 1945 with a converted World War II radar antenna. Now named after Lovell, the landmark fully-steerable 76-metre Lovell Telescope was completed in 1957, just in time to track the Soviet Sputnik satellite. At the time there was a fuss about running over budget. But it made Britain the leader in radio astronomy, and over the past half-century the country has made important observations of quasars, gravitational lenses, and astronomical masers.

The big dish was the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope when built, and today is the third largest, behind the 100- by 110-metre Green Bank Telescope in rural West Virginia, US, and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy's 100-metre Effelsberg Telescope in Germany. Upgraded extensively early in this decade, the Lovell Telescope shares the site with three smaller radio telescopes, and is part of the Multi-Element Radio Linked Interferometer Network (MERLIN) an array of British radio telescopes, which began operation in 1980.

Several million pounds have already been spent to upgrade the array to a more powerful and sensitive version called E-MERLIN. But the cash-strapped UK Science and Technology Facilities Research Council now wants to cut the 2.7 million pounds a year it would need to operate the upgraded system. It needs the money to maintain its partnership in the Gemini Observatory, without which British astronomers would be left without time on the new generation of giant optical telescopes in the northern hemisphere. The council had tried cutting Gemini funding first, but has been looking for alternatives since astronomers howled in protest.

But the cuts to Jodrell Bank "will be a disaster", Lovell, now 94 but still active, told the Times Online. "MERLIN is dealing with problems that are of fundamental importance." He worries that Jodrell Bank itself can't survive without E-MERLIN.

Surely there are times when old instruments no longer justify their upkeep, but Jodrell Bank is hardly at that point. The newly upgraded E-MERLIN promises to be a powerful array, and the big dish itself - like Arecibo - is a rare resource that would cost an inordinate sum to replace. Did anyone think through what the budget cuts meant? Has the British government grown too enamored of building new toys to see the value of older instruments? What do you think?

Friday, March 07, 2008

Should Galileo's tomb be opened for DNA tests?

More than 365 years after his death, Galileo Galilei has become the focus of another controversy involving the Catholic Church and science. Italian scientists want to open his tomb to do DNA tests, but the priest in charge of the church where he is buried says it would be disrespectful.

Paolo Galluzzi, the director of the Institute and Museum of the History of Science in Florence, Italy, is leading a group of scientists who want to have Galileo's remains exhumed along with those of the other body entombed with him, in order to carry out the DNA tests.

The scientists hope the tests will allow them to determine if the other remains are really those of his daughter, Maria Celeste, as well as determine the cause of the blindness that afflicted the famed astronomer late in life.

But Antonio Di Marcantonio, the priest in charge of the Santa Croce basilica in Florence, in which Galileo's tomb resides, is against the idea, as are several members of the Florence city council. "This is a carnival," Di Marcantonio was quoted as saying in a London Daily Telegraph story. "Leave us in peace. Nothing should be touched."

Maria Celeste's letters to Galileo are the subject of a very interesting book called Galileo's Daughter that came out a few years ago. The book shed light on Galileo's daily life and his relationship with his daughter, who was a nun.

Why is there any doubt about the second set of remains belonging to Maria Celeste? According to Galileo's Daughter, they were found with Galileo's remains, when they were moving the astronomer's remains to the tomb in Santa Croce in 1737. (Galileo had originally been buried beneath a bell tower, rather than in Santa Croce, because of his pariah status with the Church.)

The remains appeared to belong to a female who had died before Galileo did - Maria Celeste died young, eight years before Galileo himself, so they were assumed to be hers. It would be surprising to me if the remains were not hers, but since there was no inscription, and apparently no record of her being buried with him under the bell tower, I suppose there is some room for doubt.

On a personal note, I saw Galileo's tomb myself a couple of years ago on a trip to Italy. I was pleased to see the Sun-centred solar system clearly depicted on his tomb inside the church, which seemed just and fitting after all he went through at the Church's hands for his endorsement of the idea.

I also saw the remains of his middle finger on display at the history of science museum. It was taken off the body by a collector of antiquities named Anton Francesco Gori when Galileo's remains were moved into the Santa Croce tomb in 1737, more than 90 years after the astronomer's death.

It was a bit morbid of Gori to cut the finger off, I think. But the DNA tests seem worthwhile, and I'm sure the process could be carried out in a respectful way. What do you think?

Are we sending the right message to ET?

It's midnight on a far-flung planet and some alien astronomers happen to have their radio telescopes pointed right at Earth, when they get a tiny spike in RF power - it's a message! Quick, decode it. What's it say?

No joke. Doritos' latest effort will see the UK public trying to come up with the winning 30-second spot that evidently will represent humanity's first interstellar ad campaign. With that universal fame, the winner will collect the tidy sum of 20,000 GBP.

In June, the ad will be broadcast using the high frequency radar telescope at the EISCAT Space Centre in Svalbard, Norway. It'll be aimed toward the "habitable zone" around one of the stars in the Ursa Major constellation, one of our best candidates for an untapped populace of snack food consumers.

But it's 42 light years away. By the time they get the message and pop over, just think of all the Doritos flavours there will be.

OK, OK, so everybody loves a good PR stunt. Admittedly it could be more enticing than the heady stuff we've been pumping out until now, or nothing at all. And I'm as compulsive a Doritos eater as the next guy (or the next seagull).

But we are, conceivably, talking about the first impression we are going to make on an alien population. Couldn't we advertise something more representative of our cultures, our hopes and dreams and interplanetary worthiness? Like Spam? Corn dogs? Help me out here. After June the marketing floodgates shall be open forever - what do you think we should be pitching to the universe at large?